“They come from a big factory near Utica”

As the lone Toppy editor with kids (and no, Brian and Blaine, the dogs don’t count on this one, as you’ll see in a moment), I sometimes have to field questions that my co-editors get to avoid. Not just, “Daddy, why are we pulling over again just so you can play with your radios,” but some more complicated ones, too, like when the then not-quite-five-year-old asked, shortly after her baby brother was born…

“Daddy, where do babies come from?”

Hence the title of today’s installment. OK, so I’m going to a very, very bad place someday for not immediately giving her a comprehensive and honest explanation of how mommies and daddies love each other very much, etc. etc. And I’m probably going to an even worse place for pointing out, as we were headed across the Hamilton Skyway in southern Ontario a few months later, the smokestacks of the factory where, as I explained to her, Canadian babies are made (there being complex tariff issues that prevent the babies from being shipped to Canada from the aforementioned factory near Utica.) And in case that place isn’t bad enough, I’m surely headed someplace really awful for pointing out, as we sat in the stands at a Rochester Amerks-Hamilton Bulldogs hockey game a few weeks ago, that the Bulldogs were originally known as the “Hamilton Babymakers,” after the local industry, until the nickname was changed.

But look – the kid will find out the truth soon enough anyway. And it gives me an excellent hook for this week’s batch of IDs, which (unlike babies) really do come from Utica and vicinity.

These IDs, incidentally, capture the Mohawk Valley radio scene at an interesting time in its history, just before a huge shuffle of owners and formats (though, oddly, not a single callsign change) that resulted from Clear Channel’s exit from the market a few months after we recorded these in October 2007. We do have updates on pretty much all of these, and they’ll get posted here eventually, assuming the kid doesn’t come after me first for feeding her such a crazy story about the origin of her baby brother…